Drew talks about SXSW, Facebook's redesign and Fark's lack of "Twitter initiatives". Bonus: headlines of the week for last week hidden at the bottomPosted by Drew at 2009-03-23 1:45:27 PM (104 comments) | Permalink

I was at South by Southwest (SXSW) last week in Austin. Everybody at SXSW loves the Twitter. I was asked what Fark's Twitter initiatives were. Truth to tell we haven't really fleshed that one out yet. Part of the reason is that Twitter is built to push messages out to your followers, the same way we put my blog posts to the main page of Fark (or for that matter anything else on the main page of Fark). But the other part of the reason is we just don't have the resources to be early adopters. For example, this Facebook Connect thing seems like it might be an okay idea, but it's too early to tell. We'll let other people figure it out. As Internet rabblerouser Joe Peacock already noted, until someone actually does work out a strategy, the concept of "Twitter initiatives" is doomed to become another one of those corporate buzzword things that eventually becomes a mockery of itself.

Speaking of Twitter initiatives, Facebook did a major redesign recently and the thing looks like Twitter now. Far be it from me to criticize other people's site redesigns (my official stance with any redesign is "you'll get over it"), but it seems strange to me that a site with 175 million users is so scared of a site with 6 million that it destroys what made Facebook unique to become an imperfect copy of Twitter.

Twitter content is actively updated. You say to yourself "I haven't told everyone what kind of cream cheese I ate on my bagel today", and you update your Twitter status so everyone knows. Facebook content on the other hand is secondary activity created when you try to do something like look up old friends, contact people, friend them, confirm party attendance, zombie bite them, whatever (with the exception of status updates, but that's only one piece of the functionality). Facebook content for the most part consists of secondary information about what you're doing on Facebook. Its the ripples in the pool as you move around. Twitter content IS what you're doing. Twitter is the actual swimming - you have to take the strokes. This distinction is important because intentional content creation has to be sustained. Secondary content creation is a side affect and just happens.

You may have noticed that the vast majority of people don't have anything interesting to say. They may eventually get Twitter accounts and they may update but the content sucks and no one cares. Far more people are going to be doing what they're doing on Facebook for far longer -- assuming (and this is the important bit) that Facebook doesn't fark up and forget what the hell people were on Facebook to do in the first place... Whoops, too late.

I don't think Facebook is in any danger from Twitter in the first place. It's probably not a bad thing that they're not resting on their successes, because something at some point is absolutely going to knock Facebook out of their number-one-hangout-spot-on-the-Internet slot. It seems to happen on a five year cycle. Before Facebook it was Myspace, before that it was AOL, Compuserve, Usenet, etc. If someone told you ten years ago that, not only would AOL NOT be the top hangout spot on the Internet but that it would have faded into relative obscurity, you wouldn't have believed it. I don't know what's coming after Facebook, but something inevitably will. However, it's not going to be Twitter. Unless Facebook inadvertently hands the crown to Twitter.

In short, always bet on people being lazy. Eventually, people will be too lazy to continue to update 140 word statuses over a period of years. Yes it's unimaginable right now, but AOL thought the same thing at one point.

My personal favorite headline this week was from Harrison Ford getting engaged: Tired of her blowing away all the time, Harrison Ford puts large metal ring on Calista Flockhart.

Special thanks to Keith Olbermann for including the Walden Pond/Thoreau search" headline on his show. That was pretty awesome. Bonus: Olbermann showed up in another one of our top headlines this week under Politics.

I would never be productive again if they came out with a Fark iPhone app! It cannot be allowed to happen!

Since when was AOL still happening in 1999? It was well on it's way out five years earlier. The big thing in 1995 was getting your own ISP and connecting directly to that thar intrawebs using something called Netscape.

Prodigy was bigger than AOL at one point. Now nobody hears about it. I don't even know if it's out there. It wasn't one of the programs that several computers shoved up people's noses through their computers. In effect saying "We know you like the internet, here's how to get to it. Forget that you might have something else in mind. This is easier. *pat* *pat* Want a cookie?"

The main reason i have a facebook account is because people I don't know can't talk to me if I don't want them to. I can keep in touch with friends who live far away and not be worried about spam and whatnot. I've never used or seen twitter so I can't compare the two but from what I hear it's not something I would be into.

Klippoklondike:The main reason i have a facebook account is because people I don't know can't talk to me if I don't want them to. I can keep in touch with friends who live far away and not be worried about spam and whatnot. I've never used or seen twitter so I can't compare the two but from what I hear it's not something I would be into.

Facebook used to be just fine for what you are describing, but these social networking sites get too big for their own good it seems. It was fine before they started adding those stupid 3rd party apps, it has gone downhill since then. It is more of a chore to keep up with it anymore. I have better things to do with my time than to constantly inform other people that I have better things to do with my time.

Sorry folks.I am not interested in your lives enough to want instant access to your every self-indulgent twitting. Luckily, like R-rated movies and video games with violence... it can be avoided. People who biatch about twitters are like people who biatch about topless coffee shops.

The thing I worry about is the massive push to social networking cross-site content. There are so many social networking sites now, and people are so spread out across all of them, that you can't keep up with them all individually. Thus, aggregators and cross-poster services have stepped up to bat, so that not only do the other users on your current social site of choice have to know what kind of cream cheese you had on your bagel today, every other site's users will be updated of the same.

While it's okay to just say "Well then don't use Twitter" if you don't like the massively lower signal to noise ratio coming from there, the push towards cross-pollenization of site content means all the other social networking sites' content will eventually fall to the lowest common denominator.

Walled gardens are bad things because people in different gardens can't hear each other. But the answer is not to dump everyone in the same garden, and give them all progressively bigger and bigger megaphones until they can all be heard.